Today in History

French forces unofficially start the Persian Gulf ground war by crossing the Saudi-Iraqi border.

Black activist Angela Davis is released from jail where she was held for kidnapping , conspiracy and murder.

American troops begin the largest offensive of the war, near the Cambodian border.

The U.S. and Britain recognize the new Zanzibar government.

Whites join Negro students in a sit-in at a Winston-Salem, N.C. Woolworth store.

Eight nations meet in Bangkok for the first SEATO council.

Mass innoculation begins as Salk’s polio vaccine is given to children for first time.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum exhibits a collection of Hapsburg art. The first showing of this collection in the U.S.

Several hundred Nazi organizers are arrested in Frankfurt by U.S. and British forces.

Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita is hanged in Manila, the Philippines, for war crimes.

U.S. Marines plant an American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.

American bombers strike the Marianas Islands bases, only 1,300 miles from Tokyo.

A Japanese submarine shells an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California, the first Axis bombs to hit American soil.

Twelve Chinese fighter planes drop bombs on Japan.

In Russia, an unmanned balloon rises to a record height of 25 miles.

President Calvin Coolidge opposes a large air force, believing it would be a menace to world peace.

Allan MacLeod Cormack, physicist, developed the CAT scan.

An airmail plane sets a record of 33 hours and 20 minutes from San Francisco to New York.

Secretary of State Lansing hints that the U.S. may have to abandon the policy of avoiding “entangling foreign alliances”.

William Shirer, CBS broadcaster and author (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).

Britain and Germany agree on a boundary between German East Africa and Nyasaland.

Erich Kastner, German poet, novelist and children’s author (Emil and the Detectives).

Writer Emile Zola is imprisoned in France for his letter J’accuse in which he accuses the French government of anti-semitism and the wrongful imprisonment of army captain Alfred Dreyfus.

John Lee survives three attempts to hang him in Exeter Prison, as the trap fails to open.

Victor Fleming, film director (The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind)

W.E.B. [William Edward Burghardt] Du Bois, U.S. historian and civil rights leader, founder of what became the NAACP.

Texas becomes the seventh state to secede from the Union.

Great Britain officially recognizes the independence of the Orange Free State.

Forces led by Zachary Taylor defeat the Mexicans at the Battle of Buena Vista.

The Liberty Bell tolls for the last time, to mark George Washington’s birthday.

The Alamo is besieged by Santa Anna.

Poet John Keats dies of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

Baron von Steuben joins the Continental Army at Valley Forge.

Meyer Amschel Rothschild, banker and founder of the Rothschild dynasty in Europe.

George F. Handel, German composer.

Samuel Pepys, English diarist.

The Estates-General in Paris is dissolved, having been in session since October 1614.

The 5th War of Religion breaks out in France.

Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado begins his unsuccessful search for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold in the American Southwest.

The Hapsburg Charles I succeeds Ferdinand in Spain.

Emperor Diocletian orders the general persecution of Christians in Rome.